The experience of work in hospital settings and nurse’s perceived need or desire to look for A less stressful, more satisfying job

Abstract

Work overload is an important and often singular objective for organizational interventions targeting nurse satisfaction and turnover in hospital settings around the world. The centerpiece of many such interventions involves the reassignment of nursing tasks to lesser licensed or unlicensed staff in order to provide immediate term relief to over extended professional nurses. These “Substitution Interventions” (SI) evolve from the diagnostic assumptions that “lightening the load” of professional nurses with more plentifully available “others” will provide, even in the absence of other changes, immediate relief to over-extended staff, reducing their growing sense of dissatisfaction and, thus, decreasing their desire or perceived need to look for another job. The purpose of this study is to critically examine the prevailing diagnostic assumptions that underlie “Substitution Interventions” (SI) and, propose and test in a sample of hospital care-givers (n=241) an alternative organization diagnostic model that may aid in understanding their propensity to fall short of management expectations.

Citation

Rountree, B.H. and Porter, R. (2009), "The experience of work in hospital settings and nurse’s perceived need or desire to look for A less stressful, more satisfying job", International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-12-01-2009-B001